SporeWiki: 20 Questions with Will Wright now available

Last month, I made a post about SporeWiki collecting 20 questions to submit to Will Wright. Well, they have finally published his answers! Among the topics, Will discusses the possibility of expanding Spore to an MMO, his favorite Spore creations, and the things that were used to influence Spore! The Q&A is full of so many great answers that it’s hard to quote just one.

If you had to remake one of your games, which would it be and why?

If I really had to remake one it would be SimAnt. It was surprising how many people, not the ones that I thought, got into SimAnt. It was a very different group than what I was expecting to play it when I created it. But it was also one of these games that was really simple to get into and had a lot of humor in it and yet we were very constrained with what we could do logically and today I think I could make a version of SimAnt that just blow people away.

There is something extremely humorous about ants, but they are one of the most amazing visible reconstructable models we have of intelligence. We have no idea how the brain works, yet we have a pretty good sense of how an ant colony works, how it communicates, how it structures its behavior and how it pursues goals. So it is probably the highest level of intelligence we pretty much understand – that is what has always fascinating me about ants. In terms of human brains, we are still scratching the surface and we know there is a lot of complexity in there and we have a couple of little insights into how it might be working; whereas with ant colony, we understand 90% of the inner-workings of the colony. So I think that ants aside from just being bugs are interesting and a great way to come to understand how intelligence works.